Lawrence "Larry" Page[2] (born March 26, 1973) is an American computer scientist best known as co-founder of Google Inc., along with Sergey Brin. They are often known together as the "Google Guys". According to Forbes he is currently the 24th richest person in the world with net worth of US$17.5 billion in 2010.[1]
Page was born into a Jewish family in East Lansing, Michigan.[3] His parents were computer science professors at Michigan State University.[4] During an interview, Page said that "their house was usually a mess, with computers and Popular Science magazines all over the place." His attraction to computers started when he was six years old when he got to "play with the stuff lying around." He became the "first kid in his elementary school to turn in an assignment from a word processor."[5] His older brother also taught him to take things apart, and before long he was taking "everything in his house apart to see how it worked." He said,"From a very early age, I also realized I wanted to invent things. So I became really interested in technology...and business. So probably from when I was 12 I knew I was going to start a company eventually."[5]
Early life and education
Page attended the Okemos Montessori School (now called Montessori Radmoor) in Okemos, Michigan from 1975 to 1979, and graduated from East Lansing High School (1991).[6] He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in computer engineering from the University of Michigan with honors and a Masters degree inComputer Science from Stanford University. While at the University of Michigan, "Page created an inkjet printer made of Lego bricks" (actually a line plotter),[7]served as the president of the HKN,[8] and was a member of the solar car team.
[edit]Academic research
After enrolling for a Ph.D. program in computer science at Stanford University, Larry Page was in search of a dissertation theme and considered exploring the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web, understanding its link structure as a huge graph.[9] His supervisor Terry Winograd encouraged him to pursue this idea, which Page later recalled as "the best advice I ever got".[10] Page then focused on the problem of finding out which web pages link to a given page, considering the number and nature of such backlinks to be valuable information about that page (with the role of citations in academic publishing in mind).[9] In his research project, nicknamed "BackRub", he was soon joined by Sergey Brin, a fellow Stanford Ph.D. student.[9]
John Battelle, co-founder of Wired magazine, wrote of Page that he had reasoned that the "entire Web was loosely based on the premise of citation – after all, what is a link but a citation? If he could devise a method to count and qualify each backlink on the Web, as Page puts it 'the Web would become a more valuable place'."[9] Battelle further described how Page and Brin began working together on the project:
- "At the time Page conceived of BackRub, the Web comprised an estimated 10 million documents, with an untold number of links between them. The computing resources required to crawl such a beast were well beyond the usual bounds of a student project. Unaware of exactly what he was getting into, Page began building out his crawler.
- "The idea's complexity and scale lured Brin to the job. A polymath who had jumped from project to project without settling on a thesis topic, he found the premise behind BackRub fascinating. "I talked to lots of research groups" around the school, Brin recalls, "and this was the most exciting project, both because it tackled the Web, which represents human knowledge, and because I liked Larry."[9]
Brin and Page originally met in March, 1995, during a spring orientation of new computer science Ph.D. candidates. Brin, who had already been in the program for two years, was assigned to show some students, including Page, around campus, and they later became good friends.[11]
To convert the backlink data gathered by BackRub's web crawler into a measure of importance for a given web page, Brin and Page developed the PageRankalgorithm, and realized that it could be used to build a search engine far superior to existing ones.[9] It relied on a new kind of technology which analyzed the relevance of the back links that connected one Web page to another.[11] In August 1996, the initial version of Google was made available, still on the Stanford University Web site.[9]
[edit]Business
In 1998, Brin and Page founded Google, Inc.[12] Page ran Google as co-president along with Brin until 2001 when they hired Eric Schmidt as Chairman and CEO of Google. Both Page and Brin earn an annual compensation of one dollar.
[edit]Personal life
Page married Lucinda Southworth at Richard Branson's Caribbean island, Necker Island, on December 8, 2007.[13][14] Brin and Page are the executive producers of the film, Broken Arrows. In 2004, he and Sergey Brin were named "Persons of the Week" by ABC World News Tonight.
Larry Page spoke at the commencement ceremony of the University of Michigan in 2009,[15] at which time he also received an honorary Doctor of Engineering Degree.[16]
[edit]Other interests
Page is an active investor in alternative energy companies, such as Tesla Motors, which developed the Tesla Roadster, a 220-mile (350 km) range battery electric vehicle.[17] He continues to be committed to renewable energy technology, and with the help of Google.org, Google's philanthropic arm, promotes the adoption of plug-in hybrid electric cars and other alternative energy investments.[5]
[edit]Awards and recognition
In 2003, both Brin and Page received an honorary MBA from IE Business School "for embodying the entrepreneurial spirit and lending momentum to the creation of new businesses..."[18] And in 2004, they received the Marconi Foundation Prize, the "Highest Award in Engineering," and were elected Fellows of the Marconi Foundation at Columbia University. "In announcing their selection, John Jay Iselin, the Foundation's president, congratulated the two men for their invention that has fundamentally changed the way information is retrieved today." They joined a "select cadre of 32 of the world's most influential communications technology pioneers..."[19] In 2005, Brin and Page were elected Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.[20]
The World Economic Forum named Page as a Global Leader for Tomorrow and the X PRIZE chose Page as a trustee for their board.[7] PC Magazine has praised Google as among the Top 100 Web Sites and Search Engines (1998) and awarded Google the Technical Excellence Award, for Innovation in Web Application Development in 1999. In 2000, Google earned a Webby Award, a People's Voice Award for technical achievement, and in 2001, was awarded Outstanding Search Service, Best Image Search Engine, Best Design, Most Webmaster Friendly Search Engine, and Best Search Feature at the Search Engine Watch Awards."[21]
Larry Page received an honorary doctorate from the University of Michigan on May 2, 2009 during the commencement ceremony exercises of the class of 2009.[22]
In 2009, he was ranked 26th on the Forbes list of the world’s billionaires and as the 11th richest person in America, despite his compensation of one dollar annually.[23][24]
In 2009, Brin and Page were ranked fifth on Forbes' "The World's Most Powerful People" list. [25]
and
Sergey Brin
Sergey Brin (born August 21, 1973) is a Russian-American computer scientist,[5] who, along with Larry Page, is best known as the co-founder of Google, Inc., the world’s largest Internet company, based on its search engine and online advertising technology.[6] Together with Page, they are often referred to as the "Google Guys". According to Forbes he is currently the 24th richest person in the world with networth of US$17.5 billion in 2010.[7]
Brin immigrated to the United States at the age of six. Earning his undergraduate degree at the University of Maryland, he followed in his father's and grandfather's footsteps by studying mathematics, double-majoring in computer science. After graduation, he moved to Stanford to acquire a Ph.D in computer science. There he met Larry Page, whom he quickly befriended. They crammed their dormitory room with inexpensive computers and applied Brin’s data mining system to build a superior search engine. The program became popular at Stanford and they suspended their Ph.D studies to start up Google in a rented garage.
The Economist magazine referred to Brin as an "Enlightenment Man", and someone who believes that "knowledge is always good, and certainly always better than ignorance", a philosophy which is summed up by Google’s motto of making all the world’s information "universally accessible and useful"[8] and "Don't be evil".
Sergey Brin (Russian: Сергей Брин) was born in Moscow, in the Soviet Union, to Russian Jewish parents, the son of Michael Brin and Eugenia Brin, both graduates of Moscow State University. His father is a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland, and his mother is a research scientist at NASA'sGoddard Space Flight Center.[9][10]
arly life and education
Sergey Brin (Russian: Сергей Брин) was born in Moscow, in the Soviet Union, to Russian Jewish parents, the son of Michael Brin and Eugenia Brin, both graduates of Moscow State University. His father is a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland, and his mother is a research scientist at NASA'sGoddard Space Flight Center.[9][10]
arly life and education
[edit]Childhood in the Soviet Union
In 1979, when Brin was six, his family felt compelled to emigrate to the United States. In an interview with Mark Malseed, author of The Google Story,[11] Sergey's father explains how he was "forced to abandon his dream of becoming an astronomer even before he reached college. Officially, anti-Semitism didn't exist in the U.S.S.R. but, in reality, Communist Party heads barred Jews from upper professional ranks by denying them entry to universities. Jews were excluded from the physics departments, in particular..." Michael Brin therefore changed his major to mathematics where he received nearly straight A's. However, he said, "Nobody would even consider me for graduate school because I was Jewish."[12] The Brin family lived in a small, three-room, 30 square meter (350 square foot) apartment in central Moscow, which they also shared with Sergey's paternal grandmother.[12] Sergey told Malseed, "I've known for a long time that my father wasn't able to pursue the career he wanted", but Sergey only picked up the details years later after they had settled in America. He learned how, in 1977, after his father returned from a mathematics conference in Warsaw, Poland, he announced that it was time for the family to emigrate. "We cannot stay here any more", he told his wife and mother. At the conference, he was able to "mingle freely with colleagues from the United States, France,England and Germany, and discovered that his intellectual brethren in the West were 'not monsters.'" He added, "I was the only one in the family who decided it was really important to leave..."[12]
Sergey's mother was less willing to leave their home in Moscow, where they had spent their entire lives. Malseed writes, "For Genia, the decision ultimately came down to Sergey. While her husband admits he was thinking as much about his own future as his son's, for her, 'it was 80/20' about Sergey." They formally applied for their exit visa in September 1978, and as a result his father "was promptly fired". For related reasons, his mother also had to leave her job. For the next eight months, without any steady income, they were forced to take on temporary jobs as they waited, not knowing whether their application would be granted. During this time his parents shared responsibility for looking after him and his father taught himself computer programming. In May 1979, they were granted their official exit visas and were allowed to leave the country.[12]
At an interview in October, 2000, Brin said, "I know the hard times that my parents went through there, and am very thankful that I was brought to the States."[13] A decade earlier, in the summer of 1990, a few weeks before his 17th birthday, his father led a group of gifted high school math students, including Sergey, on a two-week exchange program to the Soviet Union. "As Sergey recalls, the trip awakened his childhood fear of authority" and he remembers that his first "impulse on confronting Soviet oppression had been to throw pebbles at a police car." Malseed adds, "On the second day of the trip, while the group toured a sanitarium in the countryside near Moscow, Sergey took his father aside, looked him in the eye and said, 'Thank you for taking us all out of Russia.'"[12]
[edit]Education in America
Brin attended grade school at Paint Branch Montessori School in Adelphi, Maryland, but he received further education at home; his father, a professor in the department of mathematics at the University of Maryland, nurtured his interest in mathematics and his family helped him retain his Russian-language skills. In September 1990, after having attended Eleanor Roosevelt High School, Brin enrolled in the University of Maryland, College Park to study computer science and mathematics, where he received his Bachelor of Science degree in May 1993 with honors.[14]
Brin began his graduate study in Computer Science at Stanford University on a graduate fellowship from the National Science Foundation. In 1993, he interned at Wolfram Research, makers ofMathematica.[14] He is on leave from his Ph.D. studies at Stanford.[15]
[edit]Search engine development
During an orientation for new students at Stanford, he met Larry Page. In a recent interview for The Economist, Brin jokingly said "We're both kind of obnoxious." They seemed to disagree on most subjects. But after spending time together, they "became intellectual soul-mates and close friends". Brin's focus was on developing data mining systems while Page's was in extending "the concept of inferring the importance of a research paper from its citations in other papers."[8] Together, the pair authored what is widely considered their seminal contribution, a paper entitled "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine."[16]
Combining their ideas, they "crammed their dormitory room with cheap computers" and tested their new search engine designs on the web. Their project grew quickly enough "to cause problems for Stanford's computing infrastructure." But they realized they had succeeded in creating a superior engine for searching the web and suspended their PhD studies to work more on their system.[8]
As Mark Malseed wrote, "Soliciting funds from faculty members, family and friends, Sergey and Larry scraped together enough to buy some servers and rent that famous garage in Menlo Park. ... [soon after], Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim wrote a $100,000 check to “Google, Inc.” The only problem was, “Google, Inc.” did not yet exist—the company hadn’t yet been incorporated. For two weeks, as they handled the paperwork, the young men had nowhere to deposit the money."[12]
The Economist magazine describes Brin's approach to life, like Page's, as based on a vision summed up by Google's motto, "of making all the world's information 'universally accessible and useful.'" Not long after the two "cooked up their new engine for web searches, they began thinking about information that is today beyond the web", such as digitizing books, and expanding health information.[8]
[edit]Personal life
In May 2007, Brin married Anne Wojcicki in The Bahamas. Wojcicki is a biotech analyst and a 1996 graduate of Yale University with a B.S. in biology.[4][17]She has an active interest in health information, and together she and Brin are developing new ways to improve access to it. As part of their efforts, they have brainstormed with leading researchers about the human genome project. "Brin instinctively regards genetics as a database and computing problem. So does his wife, who co-founded the firm, 23andMe", which lets people analyze and compare their own genetic makeup (consisting of 23 pairs of chromosomes).[8] In a recent announcement at Google’s Zeitgeist conference, he said he hoped that some day everyone would learn their genetic code in order to help doctors, patients, and researchers analyze the data and try to repair bugs.[8]
Brin's mother, Eugenia, has been diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease. In 2008, he decided to donate a large sum to the University of Maryland School of Medicine, where his mother is being treated.[18] Brin used the services of 23AndMe and discovered that although Parkinson's is generally not hereditary, both he and his mother possess a mutation of the LRRK2 gene that puts the likelihood of his developing Parkinson's in later years between 20 and 80%.[8] When asked whether ignorance was not bliss in such matters, he stated that his knowledge means that he can now take measures to ward off the disease. An editorial inThe Economist magazine states that "Mr Brin regards his mutation of LRRK2 as a bug in his personal code, and thus as no different from the bugs in computer code that Google’s engineers fix every day. By helping himself, he can therefore help others as well. He considers himself lucky. ... But Mr. Brin was making a much bigger point. Isn’t knowledge always good, and certainly always better than ignorance?"[8]
[edit]Censorship of Google in China
Remembering his youth and his family's reasons for leaving the Soviet Union, he "agonized over Google’s decision to appease the communist government ofChina by allowing it to censor search engine results", but decided that the Chinese would still be better off than without having Google available.[8] He explained his reasoning to Fortune magazine:
- "We felt that by participating there, and making our services more available, even if not to the 100 percent that we ideally would like, that it will be better for Chinese web users, because ultimately they would get more information, though not quite all of it."[19]
On January 12, 2010, Google reported a large cyber attack on its computers and corporate infrastructure that began a month earlier, which included accessing numerous Gmail accounts and the theft of Google's intellectual property. After the attack was determined to have originated in China, the company stated that it would no longer agree to censor its search engine in China and may exit the country altogether. The New York Times reported that "a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists, but that the attack also targeted 20 other large companies in the finance, technology, media and chemical sectors."[20][21]
[edit]Awards and recognition
In 2003, both Brin and Page received an honorary MBA from IE Business School "for embodying the entrepreneurial spirit and lending momentum to the creation of new businesses...".[22] And in 2004, they received the Marconi Foundation Prize, the "Highest Award in Engineering", and were elected Fellows of the Marconi Foundation at Columbia University. "In announcing their selection, John Jay Iselin, the Foundation's president, congratulated the two men for their invention that has fundamentally changed the way information is retrieved today." They joined a "select cadre of 32 of the world's most influential communications technology pioneers..."[23]
In February, 2009, Brin was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering, which is "among the highest professional distinctions accorded to an engineer ... [and] honors those who have made outstanding contributions to engineering research, practice...". He was selected specifically, "for leadership in development of rapid indexing and retrieval of relevant information from the World Wide Web."[24]
In their "Profiles" of Fellows, the National Science Foundation included a number of earlier awards:
- "he has been a featured speaker at the World Economic Forum and the Technology, Entertainment and Design Conference. ... PC Magazine has praised Google [of] the Top 100 Web Sites and Search Engines (1998) and awarded Google the Technical Excellence Award, for Innovation in Web Application Development in 1999. In 2000, Google earned a Webby Award, a People's Voice Award for technical achievement, and in 2001, was awarded Outstanding Search Service, Best Image Search Engine, Best Design, Most Webmaster Friendly Search Engine, and Best Search Feature at the Search Engine Watch Awards."[25]
[edit]Other interests
Brin is working on other, more personal projects that reach beyond Google. For example, he and Page are trying to help solve the world’s energy and climate problems at Google’s philanthropic armgoogle.org. He had Google invest in the alternative energy industry to find wider sources of renewable energy. They are trying to get companies to create innovative solutions to increasing the world's supply.[26] He is an investor in Tesla Motors, which is developing the Tesla Roadster, a 221-mile (356 km) range battery electric vehicle.
Brin has appeared on television shows and many documentaries, including Charlie Rose, CNBC, and CNN. In 2004, he and Larry Page were named "Persons of the Week" by ABC World News Tonight. In January 2005 he was nominated to be one of the World Economic Forum's "Young Global Leaders". He and Page are also the executive producers of the 2009 film Broken Arrows.
In June 2008, Brin invested $4.5 million in Space Adventures, the Virginia-based space tourism company. His investment will serve as a deposit for a reservation on one of Space Adventures' proposed flights in 2011. So far, Space Adventures has sent seven tourists into space.[27]
He and Page co-own a customized Boeing 767-200 and a Dornier Alpha Jet, and pay $1.4 million a year to house them and two Gulfstream V jets owned by Google executives at Moffett Federal Airfield. The aircraft have had scientific equipment installed by NASA to allow experimental data to be collected in flight.[28][29]
Brin is a member of AmBAR, a networking organization for Russian-speaking business professionals (both expatriates and immigrants) in the United States. He has made many speaking appearances.[30]
[edit]Quotes
- "When it’s too easy to get money, then you get a lot of noise mixed in with the real innovation and entrepreneurship. Tough times bring out the best parts of Silicon Valley."[26]
- "We came up with the notion that not all web pages are created equal. People are – but not web pages."[31]
- "Technology is an inherent democratizer. Because of the evolution of hardware and software, you’re able to scale up almost anything. It means that in our lifetime everyone may have tools of equal power."[31]
